I’m reading the marvellous The Atlantic Ocean by Andrew O’Hagan at the moment. It’s a collection of essays, mostly taken from The London Review of Books and is a wonderful eclectic collection of writing. Take this little gem, for example, from the opening lines of a piece about celebrity memoirs:
If you want to be a somebody nowadays, you’d better start by getting in touch with your inner nobody, because nobody likes a somebody who can’t prove they’ve been nobody all along.
Thoroughly recommended.
It’s stuff like this that proves, I think, that print has a future. Longer essays like these, don’t really work on the web. It’s hard to concentrate on the screen for too long, and often these pieces need mulling over, book or paper in hand, curled up on the sofa.
